“... the fraught relationship between African Americans and Jews, as rival entertainers of white Christian America, in his disturbing book on blackface and the movies. American popular movies, about which Rogin wrote so brilliantly, enabled him to investigate the complex intersections of political, psychic, aesthetic and social forces that fascinated him all ...”

“... The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Post-Socialist Change (1999) and more briefly in John Gray’s The Immortalisation Commission.* Preserving Lenin’s body from further decay is a bit like painting the Forth Bridge: every 18 months the body is bathed in a potassium acetate-glycerin solution and careful maintenance done on the accumulating skin ...”

“... sense to speak of salvation or redemption. Surely the idea of personal salvation is specifically Christian, and also in any case childish? No to both questions. Johnston has a particular interest in Christianity, and regularly uses its distinctive idioms, but any religion that offers different final outcomes for the good and the bad operates with a notion of ...”

“... with ostensibly dead subject-matter. For instance, Herbert’s ‘A Wreath’, which explores the Christian idea that humility contains a greater glory. For most non-Christian readers (and for a few Christians) this proposition can hardly seem the red-hot tip it once was. It is no longer news. No one is going to reel away ...”

“... of dream and reverie was already familiar. As far back as 1701, the doctor and opium enthusiast John Jones said of the intoxicated (and intoxicating) state it brought about that ‘people do commonly call it a heavenly condition, as if no worldly Pleasure was to be compared with it’; and indeed Jones went further than De Quincey ever would in describing ...”

“... extramarital pregnancy and beatings didn’t seem to bother teachers, though some composed Christian works based on Terence’s plays in order to have a cleaner alternative. Even these versions, however, retained some of the provocative elements that made Terence’s dramas so memorable. Dulcitius, a hagiographical play by the tenth-century German ...”

“... problems surrounding the familiar poll-tax registration setting of the first Christmas. Mark and John tell us nothing about Jesus’s birth; Matthew sets it in the reign of Herod the Great, to which Luke assigns the Annunciation. Luke’s specificity regarding the circumstances of the Nativity inspires confidence (2.1-5): ‘And it came to pass in those ...”

“... in Plymouth and travelled to London. With her came her husband, the English tobacco planter John Rolfe, and several members of her Native American family. Done up in embroidered silks and Flemish lace, she enjoyed – if that’s the right word – the adulation of the crowds and an audience with James I. She was not, in fact, a princess, however much ...”

“... that the ageing Coleridge was pursuing with himself. That argument was about Unitarianism, the Christian heresy within which Coleridge had come of age but which he spent much of his adult life repudiating. Barbauld represented Unitarian culture at its most public and accomplished. Born in 1743, Anna Letitia Aikin was the product of a distinguished ...”

“... he crosses out the word ‘harness’. Over on this side of the Channel, the native-born author John Braine chooses for his epigraph a snatch of neo-Romantic whimsy from the lyrics of the group Supertramp: Just as long as there’s two of us, just as long as there’s two of us I’ll carry on. Mutatis mutandis, here is the same, rather deprecatory ...”

“... John Sutherland’s pithy, cynical Life of Scott is very much a biography of our time: irreverent, streetwise, set foursquare in a ‘real world’ in which careers achieve money and power and character is at least 51 per cent image. In its worldly wisdom it resembles the first of its kind, John Gibson Lockhart’s pioneering five-volume Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (1837-8), though the drift of the two Lives is in opposite directions ...”

“... John Rawls is best known as the author of a large book of ‘grand theory’, A Theory of Justice, that changed the face and refreshed the spirit of political philosophy when it was published in 1971. He is also the author of about forty scholarly articles, beginning with a chapter on ethics from his Princeton dissertation in 1951 and culminating with a short piece on Hiroshima, published in Dissent on the 50th anniversary of the first use of nuclear weapons against civilian targets ...”

“... was in Oxford when he first encountered the living dead. One autumn night in 1869, he passed John Conington, professor of Latin, staring silently at Corpus Christi College. Nothing odd about a distracted don, except that Lang soon learned that Conington had, at that moment, been breathing his last in Boston, Lincolnshire. Years later, he discussed this ...”

“... Teeth exposed what Luttwak rightly calls the ‘tenth-century military renaissance’, and John Haldon, who has written extensively on Byzantine armies. Although Luttwak’s style reflects his journalism, his analyses are solidly rooted in recent Byzantine studies, which, as he observes in his preface, ‘have flourished as never before’. He ...”

“... demands our own. This is least surprising in Hinde. Ethology in the modern sense, and not John Stuart Mill’s, the study of animal behaviour, is self-evidently a biological science. And insofar as it concerns itself with non-human animals, it has no agents’ accounts to contend with. Least like a novelist, therefore, certainly least like a bad ...”